# Difftastic 0.63.0

- Product: Difftastic (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/difftastic)
- Vendor: Wilfred Hughes
- Date: 2025-02-11
- Version: 0.63.0
- Original notes: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.63.0
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/difftastic/releases/0.63.0

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **changed** — Difftastic now ignores the .git directory when diffing directories
- **fixed** — Fixed an issue where --display=side-by-side-show-both would not use a two-column display when one file was empty
- **removed** — Removed the --missing-as-empty argument which has had no effect since 0.46
- **changed** — File detection now supports Windows-1252 encoded text and is stricter about UTF-16 detection
- **changed** — Updated to the latest tree-sitter parser for Elixir, LaTeX, Make, Nix, Rust and YAML
- **added** — Releases now include prebuilt musl binaries

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See [the manual](https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/) to get started, and [the changelog](https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md) for historical changes.

###### Diffing

When diffing directories, difftastic now ignores the `.git` directory.

###### Display

Fixed an issue where `--display=side-by-side-show-both` would not use a two-column display when one file was empty.

###### Command Line Interface

Difftastic no longer accepts the `--missing-as-empty` argument. This argument has had no effect since 0.46.

###### Parsing

File detection now supports Windows-1252 encoded text (an extension of ISO-8859-1), and is stricter about UTF-16 detection.

Updated to the latest tree-sitter parser for Elixir, LaTeX, Make, Nix, Rust and YAML.

###### Build

Releases now include prebuilt musl binaries.